Tag: Red Family

Notes on Tokyo International Film Festival 2013

Ashkan Khatabi and Amir Jafari in “Bending the Rules”

And the Mud Ship Sails Away (Hirobumi Watanabe)

And the Mud Ship Sails Away has the nonchalant, half-assed feel of one of those Downtown sketches that start out funny and then refuse to end. The opening title – “Inertia” – pretty much sums up this meandering, no-budget hymn to the tedium of life in rural Tochigi, hinging around the exploits of an unrepentant bum called Takashi (played by the manically charismatic Kiyohiko Shibukawa). Living with his superannuated grandmother, Takashi spends his days idling in front of the TV or heading to the local bowling alley and pachinko parlor, occasionally stopping off to collect unemployment benefits that get swiftly snatched away as alimony by his ex wife. The arrival of a young girl claiming to be his half-sister doesn’t upset the balance of his life – if anything, he seems more bothered by the well-heeled former schoolmate who’s now running in a local election. But, pfft, this isn’t the kind of thing you’d watch for the story: until a bewildering final quarter that’s completely at odds with the rest of the film, And the Mud Ship Sails Away is content to be a mundane, nothing-happens comedy in the vein of early Jim Jarmusch.

Au revoir l’été (Koji Fukada)

After flunking her university entrance exams, Sakuko (Fumi Nikaido) joins her translator aunt on a trip to the Shonan coast, and proceeds to do what any self-respecting teen would do in the circumstances: mooch around, hit the beach and study as little as possible for her impending re-sits. When her aunt is reunited with an old flame, Sakuko quickly takes an interest in the man’s nephew, Takashi, who’s later revealed to be a refugee from Fukushima. But wait: if this has the markings of a damp-eyed coming-of-age drama, it really isn’t. Koji Fukada’s contribution to the seishun eiga genre opts for naturalism over melodrama, and if you’re willing to give yourself over to its softly-softly approach and meandering, sometimes inconsequential dialogue (confession: I found the first half-hour tough going), it’s quite a charmer. Recently seen in Sion Sono’s riotous Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, Nikaido is an equally radiant lead here, even if the material doesn’t give her a whole lot to do. There are some weighty themes lurking just beneath the surface: not only the ongoing Fukushima situation, but also prostitution, infertility and adultery, though none of them are overly dwelt on, and even the potential big scenes feel deliberately underplayed. It’s a slight pleasure, leaving a lingering glow rather than a deeper, more lasting impression.

A Prayer For Rain

Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain (Ravi Kumar)

On the night of December 2-3, 1984, a gas leak from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal killed more than 10,000 people. In depicting the worst industrial disaster of all time, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain manages at least not to trivialize the tragedy. Heavy on the archetypes but relatively light on the melodrama, it’s elevated from TV movie-of-the-week level mainly by the quality of its production values. Ravi Kumar’s film is clearly designed for an international audience, which means shoehorning Indian history into pre-dinner banter, introducing a fictitious and wholly superfluous foreign journalist to the story (Mischa Barton), and getting Martin Sheen to channel a little of the old West Wing magic as CEO Warren Anderson. But in its determination to take an even-handed approach, the film ends up saying very little.

Borgman (Alex van Warmerdam)

Part Haneke-esque home invasion drama, part macabre modern-day fairy tale, Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman is a splendidly nasty headfuck. Turfed out of his underground lair by a shotgun-toting priest, the scrawny, hirsute protagonist (Jan Bijvoet) goes in search of a new hideout. His attempts to ingratiate himself at the luxurious home of TV producer Richard (Jeroen Perceval) ends with him getting a sound hiding, though Richard’s wife Marina (Hadewych Minis) takes pity on the stranger, allowing him inside for a bath and something to eat. But there’s something odd about this drifter, whether it’s the way he manages to slip through the house unnoticed, the pair of dogs that follow him around, or his increasing hold over Marina and her children, especially the youngest daughter, Isolde. The supernatural elements at play in Borgman are just one complicating factor in a film that keeps its secrets closely guarded. While the rakish interloper and his associates work with a meticulous, sick logic, their intentions remain opaque even once the credits roll. Borgman is content to bewilder, but it’s quite a ride.

With its working class setting, all-enveloping nihilism and lovingly filmed sex scenes, Disregarded People feels like a throwback to the golden age of Roman porno. The anti-hero of Woman with Red Hair was a charmer compared to Yusuke Mamiana, a middle-age lowlife who returns to the scene of a troubled childhood in the Goto Islands. “I’m a survivor, like a cockroach,” he tells the virtuous Kyoko – great body, shame about the enormous birthmark on her face – after her bicycle collides with him. She’s the only person who’s smiled at him since his arrival, so he rewards her by raping her, setting the tone for the rest of the film. Kyoko admits that she found inspiration in the endlessly forgiving heroine of Crime & Punishment, but try as I might, I couldn’t find any such depths in Disregarded People. It seems to wallow in, even celebrate, the inadequacies of its protagonist, whose only redemption comes through the revelation that the people around him are nearly as bad as he is. Nao Omori gives it his all as Yusuke, leering at butts and slouching as if he was bearing the world’s consternation on his sloped shoulders. But why should we care? Even Kyoko’s eventual moral corruption, depicted in an extended coda, doesn’t reveal much, in that her character was never believable in the first place. And Yusuke? His problem lies in the asset that he considers his most valuable: at the end of the day, he’s just a dick.

The Double

The Double (Richard Ayoade)

There’s a lot going on in The Double, maybe too much. Richard Ayoade’s loose adaptation of the Dostoevsky novella locates the action in a drab, dark retro-future of indeterminate nationality (though it looks most like London). The director has mentioned Alphaville, Eraserhead and Kafka’s The Trial as influences, a list to which I’d add Brazil, Barton Fink and Jam (whose Chris Morris makes one of a number of distracting cameos). Our hero, Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg, playing to type), is a smart but socially inept office worker at a data processing firm presided over by a faintly ominous patriarch known as The Colonel. While his colleagues can’t remember his name and even the office lifts seem to be working against him, he attempts to derive small pleasures where he can, not least by creepily spying on neighbour Hana (Mia Wasikowska) with a telescope. But his life gets upended when his office employs a man who appears to be his mirror image, right down to his name, James Simon (Esienberg again, playing very much against type). Where the original is bumbling and awkward, this interloper is gregarious, confident and unashamedly lazy, getting his lookalike to do all the work while he fools around with the manager’s daughter (Yasmin Page). There’s enough here to sustain a stylish existential thriller, and The Double kept me guessing. But it feels overburdened by its eccentricities: the quirky setting starts off charming and later becomes merely distracting. I wonder if this might have been stronger – and more sinister – if Ayoade had ditched the quirk and located the action in a more grounded reality: one whose mundanity felt tangible, rather than like an affectation.

Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg)

Vivacious, flirty and with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for craft beer, Kate (Olivia Wilde) is the kind of person your girlfriend probably hates. She’s maybe a little too close to Luke (Jake Johnson), the bearded charmer who works with her at a hip Chicago microbrewery, though when they go on a double date to a lakeside cabin, it’s their respective others who end up taking things too far. Drinking Buddies isn’t the first film to ask whether “just friends” can really stay that way, especially when you want to retain canoodling privileges, but it’s seldom been done this well. Writer-director Joe Swanberg has a good feel for relationships: his characters are fickle, uncertain of what they really want. But his canniest ploy is getting the cast to improvise the dialogue themselves: the conversations overlap and trail off in the way that real people talk, rather than the constantly wisecracking characters that populate most indie rom-coms. Wilde and Johnson deliver impressive performances as the will-they-won’t-they pair at the centre of the action, though I also enjoyed Anna Kendrick’s sweet, ever-so-slightly dorky turn as Luke’s other half.

Forma (Ayumi Sakamoto)

There’s an easy crack waiting to be made about Ayumi Sakamoto’s Forma, a film where form is exactly what’s lacking. There’s probably a taut 90-minute psychological drama hiding within the blubber of this needlessly drawn-out flick, in which even the big reveal takes nearly half an hour. Sakamoto worked on a number of Shinya Tsukamoto films, though the director’s preference for brevity clearly hasn’t rubbed off. Ayako (Nagisa Umeno), a single office worker living with her father, has a chance encounter with former schoolmate Yukari (Emiko Matsuoka), who’s managed to snag an eligible fiancé despite working as security at a construction site. When Ayako offers her a job at the same company, Yukari takes it, though it soon becomes clear that her old friend’s intentions may not be altogether charitable. Forma derives much of its power from implication: key moments are played out off-camera, motivations left unclear, while the non-chronological structure allows it to withhold key information in a way that makes its effects on the characters feel all the more disquieting. But the pacing is too languid for it to sustain tension across its 145-minute running time; all those long-distance shots sap the momentum even before we get to the film’s big, exhausting set-piece. There’s plenty here to suggest that Sakamoto might be a name to watch, but for her next film I’d suggest drafting in a stringent editor.

Jîn (Reha Erdem)

It opens with rugged mountain vistas, intercut with close-ups of insects and animals at play, and then… BOOM. Gunfire and explosions strafe the forest, aimed at 17-year-old Jîn (Deniz Hasgüler) and her Kurdish separatist comrades. Reha Erdem’s film, one of two screening at TIFF this year, offers two hours of sweeping landscapes and Thomas Hardy-grade strife, as our eponymous heroine attempts to survive in a world populated by men who seem only interested in either raping her or blowing her up. Very little is explained here: when she descends from the craggy peaks and attempts to leave the area, it’s never entirely clear if Jîn’s cover story about visiting a sick grandmother is really true. In Erdem’s conception, the Turkish troops who threaten the heroine’s existence take on the same elemental quality as any other force of nature; partly because of budget constraints, the army helicopters and planes are heard rather than seen, with the gunshots and explosions seeming to come out of nowhere.

The most inspiring argument for the importance of ambition and inspiration in moviemaking at this year’s TIFF came from a film about a film that you’ll never actually be able to watch. In retrospect, it seems bizarre to consider that Alejandro Jodorowsky might ever have been handed the reins of a big-budget sci-fi picutre; back in the mid-’70s, pre-Star Wars and with memories of his lysergic masterpiece The Holy Mountain still fresh, it probably seemed even stranger. But the Chilean celluloid messiah wasn’t just approaching studios with a hazy concept: he had the whole thing mapped out in detail, with storyboards by Moebius, artwork by H.R. Giger and Chris Foss, music by Magma and Pink Floyd, and a cast including Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí. Frank Pavich’s sublimely enjoyable documentary makes the sensible decision to let Jodorowsky himself do most of the talking, and the 84-year-old is on hilarious form. His description of the games he played with Dalí in order to get the artist on board – the surrealist agreed to take part if it made him the most lavishly paid film star of all time (oh, and he wanted a burning giraffe) – is just one brilliant anecdote in a film that’s full of them. Storyboard animations recreate some of the intended sequences from the film, while its would-be director and many of the other key players recount the years that they spent producing a staggeringly detailed treatment. (One can only hope that this document, packaged in a hefty coffee table book of which only a few copies now remain, is eventually made available to a wider readership.) Jodorowsky’s tale is one of almost messianic vision and extraordinary good luck – at least, that is, until he headed to Hollywood in an attempt to get a studio on board to finance the project. It’s a crying, if not entirely surprising, shame that this film never got made, yet Jodorowsky’s enthusiasm is utterly infectious.

Love is the Perfect Crime (Arnaud & Jean-Marie Larrieu)

Mathieu Amalric – short, nervy, bulgy-eyed Mathieu Amalric – is irresistible to women. Teaching creative writing at an Alpine university, Marc has pert young students lining up for a taste of the action, though unfortunately one of them has the temerity to die post-coitus. When the girl’s distraught stepmother (Maïwenn) turns up at campus, he attempts to seduce her – while at the same time trying to resist the advances of a persistent student, fob off the detective investigating the case, and stop his department head copping off with his sister, Marianne (this being a sibling relationship that, let’s say, goes places it probably shouldn’t). Love is the Perfect Crime draws inevitable, and not especially flattering, comparisons to Hitchcock and the more noirish Coen brothers films. Amalric is an immensely watchable actor, though I just couldn’t believe that he’d be an industrial-grade chick magnet, and his character here is resolutely unsympathetic to boot. The plot’s twists are mostly pedestrian (particularly a final reveal that you’ll probably see coming way in advance), and it’s only intermittently tense. On the plus side, Amalric’s isn’t the only engaging performance here: Karin Viard is on particularly fine form as his incestuous sibling.

Of Horses and Men (Benedikt Erlingsson)

This blackly comic ensemble piececrams more incident into its 81 minutes than I would ever have expected from an arthouse film set in rural Iceland. The barren countryside provides the setting for a series of interwoven tales of accidental death, horse shooting, local rivalries and simmering middle-aged passions. It’s like The Archers with better scenery. The film is amusing in places and frequently attractive to look at, and the 300-strong cast of horses is impressively marshaled. Would that we were given time to care about any of the humans involved. Director Benedikt Erlingsson is working in the Short Cuts mould, but at less than half that film’s running time, it’s hard for any of the stories in Of Horses and Men to gain much traction. Scenes that might have marked the emotional high point of another film are tossed off every 10 minutes or so, and by the time one of the characters disembowels his steed to take shelter inside it during a snowstorm, I was pretty much past caring. The closest the film comes to finding a running thread is in the relationship between the prim, kind-of-handsome Kolbeinn (Ingvar E Sigurdsson) and his neighbour Sólveig (Charlotte Bøving), which is complicated somewhat when her stallion forces its affections on his prized mare. There’s pleasure to be had in watching how this one-sided romance gets resolved, with its implication that human relationships aren’t really any more complicated – or tidier – than between horses.

Up is down and down is up for the protagonists of Patema Inverted, a plucky fantasy that should provide a brief pick-me-up for anyone mourning Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement. After an experiment to extract energy from gravity goes horribly wrong, much of the planet is sucked into the sky, while the earthbound survivors huddle together in a comforting authoritarian state where people go to school and work on oh-so-allegorical conveyor belts. But there’s a whole different world lurking just beneath the surface – one where physics has been flipped on its head. When Patema ventures to the surface, everything is upended: ceilings become floors, and the sky is a terrifying, gaping void, waiting to carry her off. Fortunately, she immediately runs into Age, a sympathetic youngster who discovers that this inverted, gravity-defying girl comes in handy as a human air balloon. But can our topsy-turvy twosome conquer the forces aligned against them, chiefly the refusal of their respective worlds to acknowledge each others’ existence? Patema Inverted skips along at a brisk pace, and though there are plenty of rote anime elements (off-the-rack characters, generic production design, self-aware in-jokes at the expense of atmosphere), the ingenious concept and occasionally inspired visuals were enough to compensate. And while some modern anime feels incredibly jaded, this one keeps its sense of wonder throughout.

Red Family (Lee Ju-hyoung)

The eponymous Red Family – a quartet of North Korean agents living undercover in a suburb of Seoul – have been embedded for so long that their squabbling, feckless next-door neighbours have begun to resemble a paragon of domestic contentment. Other comedies have thrived in less likely scenarios, but this Kim Ki-duk-penned production never really gets off the ground. The opening minutes make it abundantly clear that Red Family won’t be a work of realism, but it’s too clumsy in its sloganeering to pass for satire, and too nasty to work as a knockabout farce. (Does a film this broad in its stereotypes really need to be so realistic in its violence?) It’s worth sticking around mainly for the finale, where – having resigned themselves to execution by their shadowy overseers – the agents role-play one of the domestic tiffs that they overheard between their neighbors earlier in the film. It’s a scene of such weirdness, and conducted at such a hysterical emotional pitch, that I found it genuinely cathartic. If only the rest of the movie had yielded even a glimmer of that originality.

Rigor Mortis (Juno Mak)

First-time director Juno Mak’s tribute to the Hong Kong vampire movies of old, Rigor Mortis is so desaturated that even the mortal characters have a deathly pallor. Haphazardly paced and sometimes downright confusing (a working knowledge of the genre might help, but then again maybe not), it works mainly on the strength of its visuals and some strong performances from a cast of predominantly veteran actors. Chin Siu-ho (playing himself, kinda), is a washed-up screen star who moves into what must be the least densely populated apartment block in the city – too bad that he’s picked the scene of a gory murder-suicide as his new abode. Before long, he’s had a pair of ghost vampires attempt to occupy his body, mid-suicide attempt – though it turns out that there’s a far wider range of spooky happenings taking place in the building. Mak (who also wrote the screenplay) prefers to explain via flashback, and sometimes not to explain at all, meaning that there are significant stretches of the film where – if you’re anything like me – you might find yourself wondering what on earth’s going on. The climactic showdown is undoubtedly impressive to watch, but I’d struggle to tell you what actually happened; ditto the twist ending. Veterans of the original Mr Vampire series appear – not just Chin, but also Antony Chan as a past-his-prime vampire hunter who struts around all day in a gown and underwear. But it’s Nina Paw who leaves the most lasting impression, bringing real depth and vulnerability to the role of a bereaved widow who goes to desperate lengths to bring her spouse back.

A Street in Palermo (Emma Dante)

Rosa (writer-director Emma Dante) and her girlfriend, Clara (Alba Rohrwacher), have been having a heated argument when they come nose to nose in a narrow street with a car driven by Samira (Elena Cotta), the mute, long-suffering mother-in-law of Saro and his extended family. When both women refuse to back down, the situation escalates to farcical extremes, as the street’s residents first implore the outsiders to move along, then start placing bets on which of the drivers will budge first. It’s too bad that the titular street in Palermo is clearly wide enough for two vehicles to pass, because otherwise this is a wickedly satirical window into Sicilian culture and the extents of human stubbornness. While the brutish Saro (Renato Malfatti) and his male cohorts assume they’re in control of the situation, it’s the women who end up taking the upper hand; there’s a brilliant little standoff at one point, where Rosa and Samira leave their vehicles to toss away the food that’s been brought out to them, then watch each other pee in the street. Dante films most of the proceedings in restless close-up shots that seem to cling to the action, supplying momentum even when the narrative sags halfway through. Stick with it, though: the closing shot is absolutely glorious.

The Tale of Iya (Tetsuichiro Tsuta)

The publicity material for The Tale of Iya makes much of the fact that it was shot on 35mm, as if the medium was what made golden-age Japanese cinema so good. It’s a distraction (though I’ll say it: the visuals have a texture and richness that’s been far too absent in Japanese cinema since the indie crowd went digital). Director Tetsuichiro Tsuta may be a disciple of the masters, but he’s done more than just mimic their techniques here. This is a big, bold, shaggy picture, part Naked Island realism, part fantastical eco-parable. In the opening sequence, a lone mountain man stumbles upon a crashed car and its sole survivor, a baby girl. Flash forward and that girl is now an impossibly plucky high schooler who the locals compare to Princess Mononoke. Living together in an isolated mountain house, they go about their lives with steadfast devotion, doggedly hauling supplies and water up the slopes every day. Meanwhile, a group of predominantly foreign tree-huggers are waging a campaign against the construction of a mountain tunnel that they claim will disrupt the valley’s ecosystem (or something like that – this is by far the weakest segment of the film). And then there’s the idealistic Tokyoite with zero back story (Shima Onishi) who gets it into his head that mountain farming is cool. The Tale of Iya seems to change its mind a few times about what it wants to be, which only really becomes a problem during an extended, Tokyo-based coda that verges into science fiction territory.

There’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of (Hisashi Saito)

To say that not much happens in There’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of would be an understatement. Hisashi Saito’s film is a tender, well acted and beautifully lensed portrait of a married couple with lives even more mundane than mine is. Eri and Fumiya are a young, happily married couple whose lives together seem like a model of domestic harmony (he even gets up early to make breakfast) – and, though they don’t make a big deal about it, they aren’t about to let kids screw things up. While he gets up late and comes home even later from his unspecified salaryman job, she works at an arthouse cinema (which should give you an idea of where the flick expects to find its audience). I found it hard to dislike There’s Nothing…, because what it does, it does well. It’s just that there’s so little dramatic grit here; what could have been a pivotal scene comes too late, and then seems not to have left as deep an effect on our protagonists as you might think it would. In a recurring motif, Eri reads aloud from a storybook she’s borrowed from a colleague – something that initially seems like a symbol for the couple’s unborn child, though I later began to suspect it was just because it was more interesting than what’s happening onscreen.

Those Happy Years (Daniele Luchetti)

“Can we at least smash the car outside?” Guido’s sons ask as he turfs them out of his art studio so he can cavort with an attractive model. “Sure,” he replies, “here are some tools.” Daniele Luchetti’s autobiographical Those Happy Years draws on his experiences growing up in the 1970s, and the not-so-watchful eyes of a self-obsessed artist father and a mother increasingly exploring her own independence and sexuality. These two wouldn’t win any parenting awards, but they’re depicted with genuine affection, even when Guido is punching an art critic who savaged his lousy performance piece, or Serena is getting rather too intimate with a female friend at a feminist camp in France. The period detail is subtly done (the soundtrack only features a few songs from the period). It’s a warmly nostalgic work, funny and sexy, with a commanding performance by Micaela Ramazzotti.

Tinker Ticker (Kim Jung-hoon)

Tinker Ticker is a stylish executed low-budget thriller based around a conceit so implausible that I was longing for the whole thing to self-destruct. Life hasn’t been kind to Jung-gu since he blew up an abusive teacher while at high school, but he’s trying to get things back on track with a respectable university job, even if it means he has to sleep in his car every night. Oh, and he also makes bombs that he offers to people for free on the Internet. Eh? After running into a headstrong student with a surly pout worthy of a K-pop group, Jung-gu anonymously gifts the kid with one of his creations, so helping his latent sociopathy bloom. This begins a cat-and-mouse game between bomb maker and bomber – only with the former giving the latter his tools. It might somehow make sense if the script explained why Jung-gu behaved the way he does, but it’s awfully fuzzy on the psychology. Is this a budding bromance? Is he using a surrogate to enact his own violent urges? Without that key piece, Tinker Ticker is hobbled; worse, it just ends up seeming rather silly.

Genuinely virtuous characters present a challenge to filmmakers; if it’s a real-life character, you’re practically opening yourself up to charges of hagiography. To Live and Die in Ordos doesn’t quite manage to avoid that fate itself. Hao Wanzhong (Wang Jingchun), police chief in the resource-rich city of Ordos in Inner Monoglia, drops dead at the tender age of 41, leaving behind him an apparently unimpeachable legacy. When a po-faced, sceptical political journalist (Sun Liang) is assigned to write an article about him, he initially declines the job on the grounds that anything he produced would be ripped apart by China’s millions of netizens. But could it be that Hao was actually as unblemished as his reputation suggests? The journalist’s investigations are mixed with flashbacks to Hao’s life, sometimes jumping from one to the other in ways that are formally ingenious, though which never seem to imply that there’s a gap between the reality and people’s accounts of it. At the end of the day, Ordos doesn’t reveal much about its subject other than that he cared more about his work than his family and could be a bit bossy, and its wider critiques of society are muted at best. Fine performances and respectable production values make it an agreeable watch, but as the realisation dawned that it wasn’t inching towards any deeper insights, my attention waned.

Unbeatable (Dante Lam)

Friday night entertainment doesn’t come much finer than Unbeatable, Dante Lam’s pummeling, unapologetically ripe tale of buff men finding redemption through MMA. MM what? Don’t worry: it’s nothing that a couple of montage sequences can’t prepare you for, and they’ve got ringside TV commentators to explain tactics to the audience without being too blatant about it. Nick Cheung is Ching “Scumbag” Fai, the former boxing champ turned indebted ne’er-do-well, who ends up sharing an apartment in Macau with an emotionally troubled mother and her cute, precocious daughter. (To its credit, the film doesn’t sidestep the issue of mental illness, and this potentially tricky plot point is handled reasonably well.) Fai finds work at his friend’s gym, where – between conducting boxercise classes with dumpy middle-aged women – he ends up training Qi (Eddie Peng), the son of a disgraced businessman, who’s searching for meaning of his own in the ring. If this sounds over-familiar, there’s still pleasure in seeing tropes done well – and the story takes enough unexpected turns to hold the attention. Cheung’s considerable charm helps carry things, of course, though the depiction of him and his cohabitants fumbling their way towards something like contentment aren’t as cloying as they could be. Then again, it’s in the ring that the film really comes into its own: shot cleanly, without the shaky camerawork and flurry of edits that seem to pass for fight sequences in most Hollywood films, the MMA scenes are electrifying to watch. It helps that Lam’s cast clearly know their way around a fistfight and are in peak physical condition; as a friend commented, the 45-year-old Cheung’s rippling muscles are the most impressive visual effect he’s seen in a fair while.

What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love (Mouly Surya)

This dreamy Indonesian drama isn’t as Carver-esque as the title might suggest. Set in the hermetic (though alarmingly loosely supervised) world of a special needs school, it follows the contrasting efforts of two female students to find love. While Diana (Karina Salim) pines for a fellow student, Fitri (Ayushita Nugraha) is courted by a deaf-mute punk who seduces her by pretending to be a ghost doctor. The musical number that opens the film suggests that it’s going to be a real original, and the remainder doesn’t quite live up to that promise, even if it’s peppered with arresting moments. Some of the best bits just hinge on a smart mise-en-scène, as when Diana listens to a radio drama while her roommates preen and pray around her. The loose, impressionistic structure means that it drags more than it should at this kind of running time, and the side plots can feel more like distractions, but there’s still plenty to like here.

Click here for our a rather more concise Tokyo International Film Festival 2013 report

James Hadfield writes about music, film and other stuff. You can find him at @JamesHadfield